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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Without an appreciation of symbol, one cannot hope to grasp concepts such as revelation and incarnation which are foundational for theology and for other varieties of religious thought. Unfortunately, the undergraduate years find our students at an age when they are natural demythologizers: impatient and exasperated with symbols. Are we wasting our breath in trying to teach them disciplines which are constitutionally disabled from understanding? This article suggests that human cognition must develop through the successive stages of literal, conventional, critical, and conjunctive understanding. It recommends strategies for helping students move from conventional to critical thinking so as to prepare the way for conjunctive thought beyond age thirty.
1 Bernard Lonergan discusses and criticizes the assumption that knowing is like seeing in “Cognitional Structure” in his Collection, ed. Crowe, F. E. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 221-39, esp. p. 224.Google Scholar See also his discussion on pp. 238-39 of Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).Google Scholar In Spirit in the World (Montreal: Palm, 1968)Google Scholar, which is based on Thomas Aquinas' view of cognition, Karl Rahner describes three moments in cognition: a going out of subjectivity into sensibility, that is, receptivity to the world: a flowing back into subjectivity in which the concept is formed, and a return or conversion back to the phantasm. These three structural moments occur simultaneously. See also Rahner's later descriptions of the knowing subject in Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Seabury, 1978), ch. 1.Google Scholar
2 For a discussion of the dimensions of the problem of cognition in Kant, see Copleston, Frederick S.J., , A History of Philosophy 6: Modern Philosophy, Part II, Kant (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1964), esp. pp. 12–13Google Scholar: “ … [W]e have to be careful not to draw the conclusion that Kant is thinking about innate ideas, supposed to be present in the human mind before experience in a temporal sense of the word “before.” Pure a priori knowledge does not mean knowledge which is explicitly present in the mind before it has begun to experience anything at all: it means knowledge which is underived from experience, even if it makes its appearance as what we would ordinarily call ‘knowledge’ only on the occasion of experience. Consider the following famous and often-quoted statements. ‘That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubty…. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.’”
3 For an excellent discussion of Piaget's genetic epistemology, see Elkind's, David “Editor's Introduction” to Jean Piaget, Six Psychological Studies, trans. Tenzer, Anita and Ed. Elkind, David (New York: Random House Vintage, 1968).Google Scholar
4 See in particular the first and last chapter of Lonergan, Bernard, The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, trans. O'Donovan, Conn from the first part of De Deo Trino (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976).Google Scholar For my purposes, I will use Lonergan's concepts of the “naive realist,” the “dogmatic realist,” and the “critical realist” in the sense in which he defines them in this early work. Those who wish to examine Lonergan's later refinements of these modes of consciousness are referred to his essays “Cognitional Structure” and “Dimensions of Meaning” in Collection, pp. 221-39 and 253-67. See also Lonergan's, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978 [1957]) and Method in Theology.Google Scholar
5 See Lonergan, , The Way to Nicea, p. 113.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., p. 132.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 129.
9 Ibid., p. 132.
10 Among theorists who describe human development in terms of stages, I would count Erik Erikson in the psychoanalytic tradition and Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget himself in the cognitive-developmental tradition. James Fowler draws upon both of these traditions. The work of Bernard Lonergan has been mentioned here for purposes of comparison. I do not mean to imply that his analysis of the modes of human consciousness should be classified as a cognitive-developmental theory. Lonergan would prefer the term “conversion” to “development.”
11 See Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Buchanan, Emerson (New York: Harper & Row, 1967)Google Scholar, especially the last chapter, “Conclusion: The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought,” where Ricoeur says on p. 350 that “the dissolution of the myth as explanation is the necessary way to the restoration of myth as symbol.” So, for example, critical cognition recognizes the biblical Creation stories to be “incorrect” as historical accounts and it posits human psychological need as the genesis of Genesis. Only after coming to grips with this disappointment can one resubmit to the power of the symbol of the Creation.
12 See Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).Google Scholar Ricoeur remarks on p. 55 that: “ …[F]or the one who participates in the symbolic signification there are really not two significations, one literal and the other symbolic, but rather a single movement, which transfers him from one level to the other and which assimilates him to the second signification by means of, or through, the literal one.” On page 56 Ricoeur says: “ … [T]he symbol assimilates rather than apprehends a resemblance. Moreover, in assimilating some things to others it assimilates us to what is thereby signified. This is precisely what makes the theory of symbols so fascinating, yet deceiving. All the boundaries are blurred—between the things as well as between the things and ourselves.” Ricouer also speaks of second naïveté as a “Copernican Revolution” in which “the being which posits itself in the Cogito has still to discover that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the whole does not cease to share in the being that challenges it in every symbol”; see The Symbolism of Evil, p. 356.
13 See Ricoeur's discussion of primitive and second naïveté in The Symbolism of Evil, pp. 350-51.
14 Ibid., p. 350.
15 Ibid., p. 349.
16 While this article concerns itself primarily with younger students, today's typical undergraduate class presents the teacher with some individuals of more mature years. In my experience with undergraduate and graduate women students who have returned to school after raising families, and who often are quite afraid of confronting what they construe to be the dark secrets of modern theology, I find that many of them have worked their own way through to a second naïveté without knowing it. In their theological studies they have to “go back” to recover a critical mode of cognition that is no longer their own. When they realize that the critical-transcendental thrust of much scholarly religious literature is something that they have already assimilated and moved beyond, they laugh.
17 This work is reported in Fowler, James W., Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).Google Scholar See also Thomas Groome's discussion of Fowler's work on pp. 70-73 of Christian Religious Education (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).Google Scholar The evidence which Fowler presents concerning the distribution of stages among the population is scientific in that it comes from relatively reliable analysis of responses to an open-ended questionnaire.
18 Fowler, , Stages of Faith, pp. 24–25.Google Scholar Fowler offers a more formal definition on pp. 92-93, where faith is: “People's evolved and evolving ways of experiencing self, others, and world (as they construct them) as related to and affected by the ultimate conditions of existence (as they construct them) and of shaping their lives' purposes and meanings, trusts and loyalties, in light of the character of being, value and power determining the ultimate conditions of existence (as grasped in their operative images—conscious and unconscious—of them).”
19 Ibid., p. 149.
20 Ibid., pp. 172-73.
21 Ibid., pp. 182-83.
22 The late-adolescent development which Fowler depicts in terms of these latter two stages, synthetic-conventional faith and individuative-reflective faith, is described with somewhat greater resolution by Perry, William G. Jr., , in Forms of Intellectual Development in the College Years (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1968).Google Scholar Perry found nine positions on truth and authority espoused by young people as they encounter a plurality of views in college and work their way through phases of relativism to commitment. Perry's sample was small and most of his respondents were male students at Harvard College. Nevertheless, his findings amplify the picture of the twenty-year-old demythologizer which I am attempting to draw in this article. It is interesting to note, however, that when Perry's twenty-two year-old Harvard senior decides to commit himself to some value in a world of relative and conflicting values, he has not yet achieved second naïveté or conjunctive understanding. On the contrary, this commitment is an effort by executive subjectivity to impose or assert absolute value for itself where none is perceived to exist independently of the subject!
23 Note that Ricoeur concurs that the re-empowerment of the symbol is the goal of the project of demythologization. See his “Preface to Bultmann,” trans. Peter McCormick, pp. 49-72 in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Mudge, Lewis S. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980).Google Scholar
24 Fowler, , Stages of Faith, p, 198.Google Scholar
25 Ibid., pp. 197-98.
26 Lonergan has on occasion disparaged symbolic language as being a poor vehicle for affirming the truth—as if it were the business of symbol to affirm. In The Way to Nicea, pp. 110-11, one finds this remark: “For while symbols are a particularly effective, and indeed necessary means of penetrating man's sensibility and arousing his affectivity, they are apt to be somewhat ambiguous vehicles of the truth.” Lonergan, like many contemporary theologians, treats symbol as a vehicle for the expression or evocation of feeling, rather than as the indispensable matrix of thought itself. In Method in Theology, for example, he writes: “A symbol is an image of a real or imaginary object that evokes a feeling or is evoked by a feeling”; see p. 64 and the ensuing discussion. For Lonergan, cognition seems to bring the symbol to terms, interpret it, dissolve it, and leave it behind. This is precisely what I mean by critical cognition. But I contend that the reengagement with symbol for which such criticism clears the way is not a matter merely of feeling or of existential decision but of knowing, that is, of cognition, in a conjunctive mode.
27 See the table to data on p. 322 of Stages of Faith, which reports the frequency of the occurrence of the stages among Fowler's respondents according to their age.
28 This correlation is more than a coincidence. Piaget was convinced of the significance of the resemblance he discerned between the primitive logic of the child, and that of our cultural ancestors and of non-technological peoples today. See, for example, Piaget, Jean, “The Mental Development of the Child” in Six Psychological Studies, pp. 41–48.Google Scholar
29 One recalls that there was a moment in Religionswissenschaft when those other than ourselves were considered pagans. Kees W. Bolle lists characteristic paired categories of “wooden objectifying” thought from that moment in the development of method in religion study: the others versus ourselves, paganism and heathens versus the true religion, natural versus revealed religion, and so forth. See p. 111 of “History of Religions with a Hermeneutic Oriented Toward Christian Theology?” in The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, ed. Kitagawa, Joseph M.et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 89–118.Google Scholar
30 The term “interesting stuff” is used by Kees W. Bolle (ibid., p. 99) to describe what many people think of religious phenomena. Bolle remarks that: “In most of our institutions of learning the History of Religions is in fact given the place of an ornament full of ‘interesting’ angles, a decorative addition to an already overloaded program…. [U]niversity administrators and publishers may still look on the History of Religions as a field for dishing out cute or interesting facts about outlandish people—with or without the varnish of greater mutual understanding of live specimens.”
31 But Thomas Groome sounds an important warning when he remarks, on p. 215 of Christian Religious Education, that: “One wonders if the fact that the great majority of people remain at stage three [synthetic-conventional stage] of faith development is not due, at least in part, to a religious education that taught too much, too soon, too finally, and from outside lived experience.”
32 See, for example, Rahner's discussion in chs. 1 and 5 of Foundations of Christian Faith. I would also count H. Richard Neibuhr's analysis of “radical monotheism” among those theologies which will work forthe mind to which critical understanding is available. See his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).Google Scholar
33 See p. 11 of Bultmann's, Rudolf “New Testament and Mythology” in Bultmann, Rudolfet al., Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 1–44.Google Scholar See also Paul Ricoeur's discussion of Bultmann's demythologization proposal in “Preface to Bultmann,” esp. pp. 57-58, where: “At first glance demythologization is a purely negative enterprise. It consists in becoming conscious of the mythic clothing around the proclamation that ‘the [reign] of God has drawn near in a decisive fashion in Jesus Christ.’ In this way we become attentive to the fact that his ‘coming’ is expressed in a mythological representation of the universe, with a top and a bottom, a heaven and an earth, and celestial beings coming from up there to down here and returning from down here to up there. To abandon this mythic wrapping is quite simply to discover the distance that separates our culture and its conceptual apparatus from the culture in which the good news is expressed…. Demythologization, far from being opposed to kerygmatic interpretation, is its very first application. It marks the return to the original situation, namely, that the Gospel is not a new Scripture to be commented on but is effaced before something else because it speaks of someone who is the true word of God. Demythologization then is only the inverse side of the grasp of the kerygma.”
34 The Way to Nicea, pp. 136-37. While this vivid passage from one of Lonergan's early theological works aptly illustrates the cul-de-sac into which critical thought can lead religious understanding, some interpreters of Lonergan would point out that his later work presents a more nuanced position on biblical expression than appears in this passage.
35 See Long, Charles H., “Archaism to Hermeneutics,” in The History of Religions, pp. 67–87.Google Scholar
36 Long locates this turning point in Otto's, RudolfThe Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923)Google Scholar, which describes the a priori religious category of consciousness. See his “Archaism and Hermeneutics,” pp. 69-70.
37 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, The Faith of Other Men (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1972).Google Scholar
38 Thomas Groome holds a contrasting view. His approach in Christian Religious Education relies on the normativity and endurance of the critical mode of understanding as a structural constant in the naming of one's reality.
39 See Tillich, Paul, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).Google Scholar
40 See Foundations, Ch. 2. See also Rahner's discussion of Mystery in Theological Investigations 4, trans. Smyth, Kevin (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), pp. 36–73.Google Scholar
41 See, e.g., Crossan, John Dominic, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, IL: Argus, 1975).Google Scholar
42 Kees Bolle says this on pp. 103-104 of “History of Religions.”
43 Kees Bolle writes (ibid., p. 106) that: “Transmythologizing … is more than translating; it is more than linguistic know-how; it is more than identifying the Latin deus with god. The work of hermeneutics is not limited to a thorough understanding of the structure of another religious tradition. It is at the same time a matter of recognizing the shape and the power in our own—its shape being revealed in the sudden light thrown upon it by the other tradition; its power manifesting itself in providing vital resources in places where we had not even suspected life.” Bolle says that the term “transmythologization” was coined by R. Panikkar: “to convey the proper means of understanding religious phenomena, that is, not by reducing, but by renewing, their sense of orientation within the process of understanding which itself functions as a cross-fertilization of traditions.” Bolle cites his source as Panikkar's article “unmythologisierung” in Kultmysterium in Hinduismus und Christentum (Freiburg: Alber, 1964).Google Scholar In the same vein, see also Schlette, Heinz Robert, Towards a Theology of Religions, trans. O'Hara, W. J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966).Google Scholar
44 See Bellah, Robert N., “Religion in the University: Changing Consciousness, Changing Structures,” p. 14Google Scholar, in Religion in the Undergraduate Curriculum: An Analysis and Interpretation, ed. Welch, Claude (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges, 1970), pp. 13–18.Google Scholar See also Bellah's, “Christianity and Symbolic Realism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 9 (1970), 89–99;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and responses, 100-15. Bellah's, essay “Religious Studies as ‘New Religion’,” in Needleman, Jacob and Baker, George, eds., Understanding the New Religions (New York: Seabury, 1978), pp. 106–12Google Scholar, elaborates his proposal.
45 An excellent discussion of transubstantiation may be found in Schillebeeckx, Edward, The Eucharist, trans. Smith, N. D. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968).Google Scholar
46 This view is exemplified in Schillebeeckx' approach to the Eucharist in his Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1963).Google Scholar
47 See Segundo, Juan Luis, The Sacraments Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1974).Google Scholar Schillebeeckx' discussion of the political nature of the liturgy may be found in God the Future of Man (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968)Google Scholar and The Understanding of Faith: Interpretation and Criticism, trans. Smith, N. D. (New York: Seabury, 1974)Google Scholar, as well as in the last part of Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. Bowden, John (New York: Seabury, 1980).Google Scholar
In undergraduate sacramental theology courses, I have moved from conventional to critical understanding with the following pattern: four weeks on the biblical and experiential sources of sacramentality, four weeks on the history of the development of sacramental theology and practice, and four weeks on critical discussion of these data by the students themselves, guided, e.g., by Segundo's programmatic outline.
48 See “The Bhagavad-Gita,” pp. 102-63 in Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Moore, Charles A., eds., A Source Book in Indian Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the introductory notes on pp. 101-102.
49 See verses 5 through 9:
The Blessed Lord said:
Many are My lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know but thou knowest not, O Scourge of the foe (Arjuna).
Though I am unborn, and My self is imperishable, though I am the Lord of all creatures, yet, establishing Myself in My own nature, I come into [empiric] being through My power (maya).
Whenever there is a decline of righteousness and rise of unrighteousness, O Bharata (Arjuna), then I send forth [create incarnate] Myself.
For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of righteousness, I come into being from age to age.
He who knows thus in its true nature My divine birth and works is not born again, when he leaves his body but comes to Me, O Arjuna.
50 The literary device of the dialogue between friends reinforces this interpretation.
51 See verses 16 through 22:
What is action? What is inaction?—as to this even the wise are bewildered. I will declare to thee what action is, knowing which thou shalt be delivered from evil.
One has to understand what action is, and likewise one has to understand what is wrong action, and one has to understand about inaction. Hard to understand is the way of work.
He who in action sees inaction and action in inaction—he is wise among men, he is a yogin, and he has accomplished all his work.
He whose undertakings are all free from the will of desire, whose works are burned up in the fire of wisdom—him the wise call a man of learning.
Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of works, ever content, without any kind of dependence, he does nothing though he is ever engaged in work.
Having no desires, with his heart and self under control, giving up all possessions, performed action by the body alone, he commits no wrong.
He who is satisfied with whatever comes by chance, who has passed beyond the dualities (of pleasure and pain), who is free from jealousy, who remains the same in success and failure—even when he acts, he is not bound.
52 See verses 35 and 38:
When thou hast known it, thou shalt not fall again into this confusion, O Pandava (Arjuna), for by this thou shalt see all existences without exception in the Self, then in Me.…
There is nothing on earth equal to the purity of wisdom. He who becomes perfected by yoga finds this of himself, in his self [atman] in the course of time.